I was listening to a recent episode of The Rest is Science (fantastic Podcast, by the way - go listen), and in this particular episode Michael and Hannah were discussing boredom. At one point in the episode, Michael mentions an experiment where Dutch scientists put a hamster wheel out in the wild. The theory goes that we humans put a wheel in the hamster cage to provide the little guy with some stimulation, as they can't go running around the woods any more. But the experiment had some i...

TAIPEI (February 11, 2026) — Shield AI announced today that it has signed a contract with Taiwan’s National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST) to advance the development, demonstration, and deployment of AI-piloted unmanned systems. The collaboration will integrate Shield AI’s Hivemind platform into NCSIST’s intelligent unmanned systems, supporting both software development and operational fielding. Under the agreement, NCSIST will use Shield AI’s Hivemind platf...

I am quite content to be alone except on a mild evening at twilight.  During the quick hours of the day I am busy. Busy with things I enjoy doing, for the most part. Or busy with people I enjoy being around. I count myself among the luckiest alive.  During the night I am dreaming. Night is dreaming time whether I am asleep or awake. The dreams are all mine. I stretch out in the bed and in my mind. I  never had such space before. Even in my childhood, my dreams were so small, so bordered. ...

A key challenge working with coding agents is having them both test what they’ve built and demonstrate that software to you, their overseer. This goes beyond automated tests - we need artifacts that show their progress and help us see exactly what the agent-produced software is able to do. I’ve just released two new tools aimed at this problem: Showboat and Rodney . Proving code actually works Showboat: Agents build documents to demo their work Rodney: CLI browser automatio...

Recently I have started going Raw+DC on my databases . I think I love it. Let me explain. TL;DR; After 25+ years championing ORMs, I’ve switched to raw database queries paired with Python dataclasses. I’m calling it the Raw+DC pattern . The result: better AI coding assistance, fewer aging dependencies, comparable or better performance, and type safety where it counts. ORM/ODM Raw+DC Pattern Type safety...

That expectation is linear is one of my favourite facts. I got a first taste of this when I was doing an internship at an unnamed trading firm. Some guy was teaching me the basics of trading and showing me how traders (of which I was not one) were expected to have heuristics that would allow them to make snap judgments about things like expectation. As an example, he asked me, in more words, what the expected rank when flipping over the top card of a deck of cards was (A=1, J=11, Q=12, K=13). ...

Sometimes you need more than a Recovery Kit Nano, more than the Recovery Quick Kit , and even more than the Recovery Kit 2 . What started as a project to get a 19" rack into a Pelican 1607 Air ended up with a very modular, very DIY, and very over-the-top PC build. The series of Recovery Kits started in 2019 for me, with some of my earliest projects going back even earlier. Each Recovery Kit until now has been based on a Raspberry Pi, the little board that has powered so many cyberdecks . ...

I recently claimed a rebate for installing an electric vehicle (EV) charger, only to discover that Eversource, my power supplier, was publicly exposing personal information of customers who applied, including: Full names Vehicle registration certificates (including plate number and vehicle identification number) Home addresses Email addresses Phone numbers I’ll include the backstory that led me to the vulnerability, but if you just want to know about the security vulnerability,...

(This is a chapter of a longer report I’m working on that summarizes and expands the last several years of my work on construction productivity. I plan on publishing one chapter a month on the newsletter, and aim to have the full report done by the end of the year.) For decades, American construction has fallen behind almost every other major sector in productivity growth. As far back as 1970 researchers noted that construction productivity improvement significantly lagged productivity impro...

A reader worried about the future. I am writing this email as a young aspiring researcher/scientist. We live in a period of uncertainty and I have a lot of doubts about the decisions I should make. I've always been interested in mathematics and physics and I believe that a career in this area would be a fulfilling one for me. However, with the development of AI I'm starting to have some worries about my future. It is difficult to understand what is really happening. It feels like everyday these ...

Here's a story I tell my mentees often—and it's one where I almost made an expensive mistake. A few years ago, my team was tasked with rebuilding the authentication system for one of our core products. We walked into that room with a massive assumption already locked and loaded: "Authentication isn't our core business. We should buy, not build." It made perfect sense on paper. We assumed buying a vendor solution like Auth0 would be faster, safer, and cheaper. We assumed building it oursel...

A PSLV rocket, and its fairing being prepared pre-launch. One human on the bottom right of the left image for scale. Images: ISRO The January 12 launch of India’s PSLV rocket failed due to the third stage’s mysteriously anomalous performance, the resulting tumbling of which was visible even on telemetry screens in the mission control and livestream. 16 spacecraft were lost to the air and sea, spanning a key national hyperspectral satellite , seven private Indian ones, five from Brazil,...

Programming Aphorisms Feb 11, 2026 A meta programming post — looking at my thought process when coding and trying to pin down what is programming “knowledge”. Turns out, a significant fraction of that is just reducing new problems to a vocabulary of known tricks. This is a personal, descriptive post, not a prescriptive post for you. It starts with a question posted on Ziggit. The background here is that Zig is in the process of removing ambient IO capabilities. Currently, you can...

“Home is behind, the world ahead and there are many paths to tread, through shadows to the edge of night, until the stars are all alight.” ― The Lord of the Rings My journey began with a few obstacles. After boarding the plane to Qatar, it took more than three hours for the departure. First, we went for the mandatory de-icing. Then, there was a medical emergency on board, which took so long that a second de-icing was necessary. Safety goes first, and it was all beyond control, but ...

The Japanese are really good at woodworking. And I love watching the Yankee workshop, my dad makes Native American bows and arrows completely from scratch in his workshop with trees that he finds.  This is all different from the stuff you get at IKEA, but I’ve been coding now for money for 35 years and systems are still complicated, computers still do dumb stuff, humans still do dumb stuff, this is just like the move from assembler to C, like the introduction of syntax highlighting, the intro...

When programming, we chain functions together. Function A calls function B. And so forth. You do not have to program this way, you could write an entire program using a single function. It would be a fun exercise to write a non-trivial program using a single function… as long as you delegate the code writing to AI because human beings quickly struggle with long functions. A key compiler optimization is ‘inlining’: the compiler takes your function definition and it tries to substitute i...

If you were asked to picture how electrons move, you could be forgiven for imagining a stream of particles sluicing down a wire like water rushing through a pipe. After all, we often describe electrons as “flowing” in an “electric current.” In reality, water and electricity flow in completely different ways. Whereas water molecules move together to form a swirly, coherent substance… Source If you were asked to picture how electrons move, you could be forgiven for imagining a stream ...

It had been at least five minutes since Clara’s father handed down an old computer. I kid, but it’s been amazing reminiscing with him over these old machines, and tinkering to get them all working again. Our latest addition to the family is a slightly more modern box: an Athlon64 from 2005, built around an Asus K8V SE Deluxe motherboard and an amazing beige Antec case. Already I can see myself filling it up with all my spare optical and disk drives, and it becoming my primary Windows XP-er...

I thought that 2025 was weird and didn't think it could get much weirder. 2026 is really delivering in the weirdness department. An AI agent opened a PR to matplotlib with a trivial performance optimization, a maintainer closed it for being made by an autonomous AI agent, so the AI agent made a callout blogpost accusing the matplotlib team of gatekeeping . This provoked many reactions: Aoi What. Why? How? What? Are we really at the point where AI agents make callou...

«Not sure if this can turn into a blogger's challenge» , he said. Well, we can certainly try: Blogs that don’t have a contact email. The smell of cauliflowers when they’re cooking. Drivers who do not respect safety distances. Loud people in public places. Loud people in general. All the bros: crypto-bros, ai-bros, gym-bros. When you go buy something online, and only your size is sold out. People with no spatial awareness at the supermarket. Green shield bugs . ...

Some more thoughts from last week’s open space gathering on the future of software development in the age of AI. I haven’t attributed any comments since we were operating under the Chatham House Rule , but should the sources recognize themselves and would like to be attributed, then get in touch and I’ll edit this post.  ❄                ❄ During the opening of the gathering, I commented that I was naturally skeptical of the value of LLMs. After all, the decades...

After 7 years with a Tesla Model 3, we picked up a gen 2 Rivian R1S in April of 2025. We still have the Model 3 as a second vehicle, but it’s been really cool experiencing a new electric vehicle from a very passionate new company. 2026 is a really exciting time for Rivian, as in the first half of this year they’re launching their R2 vehicle - a smaller, less expensive SUV offering that should have a lot more mass-market appeal. With a bunch of jourrnalists getting previews of the vehicle...

Last year I first started thinking about what the future of programming languages might look like now that agentic engineering is a growing thing. Initially I felt that the enormous corpus of pre-existing code would cement existing languages in place but now I’m starting to think the opposite is true. Here I want to outline my thinking on why we are going to see more new programming languages and why there is quite a bit of space for interesting innovation. And just in case someone wants to s...